Crazy Penguin Catapult

When we interviewed video game legend and Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins a few months ago, he mentioned that DChoc was working hard on its iPhone catalog. Though perhaps a bit late to the party, the publisher is arriving on the App Store in style with two mobile ports: Crazy Penguin Catapult and Chocolate Shop Frenzy.

Crazy Penguin Catapult, an imaginative action-puzzle game that involves bombarding polar bear bullies with kamikaze penguins, was one of our favorite mobile games of 2008. It’s a two-part deal. First, you play a little timing minigame to launch the penguins into the air with a steam catapult; then, once they’re airborne and winging towards their targets, you tap the screen to decide when and how they plummet towards the bears. If you do it right, they’ll carom all over the level before bowing out, wreaking havoc on the aggressors in the process.

From the App Store page:

“Award Winning and Most Anticipated Game! Fend off invading Polar Bears by hurtling courageous penguins at them with your trusty catapult!

Help the penguins win back Antarctica and play 30 levels of hilarious action! Triumph in boss battles and unlock crazy penguin power-ups including Ninja, Fire, The Twins and more! Load your cute little penguins onto the catapult and launch them to the sky!

Game Features:

– Play 30 levels including Boss Battles and Bonus Levels

– Two great games in one: Arcade-style ‘Campaign’ mode and turn-based ‘Strategy’ mode

– Use 9 clever power-ups

– Explore 3 unique maps”

Chocolate Shop Frenzy is DChoc’s (fitting) answer to time-management games like Diner Dash, Sally’s Salon, and especially Cake Mania. You play a chocolate shop proprietress who must constantly bustle from one station to another, filling orders and keeping the customers happy.

The App Store sayeth:

“Are you ready to become a chocoholic? Help Emma achieve her life long dream to become a chocolate shop owner. Emma just quit her marketing job and she now has to successfully run the chocolate shop for 12 months to pay back the loan. Evil competitors and other special events are not making her job any easier.

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The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

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Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

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